UK HPC investment meant to stimulate business [UPDATED]

Earlier this week computing.co.uk ran a story on a new £44m supercomputing institute in Wales in the UK. The investment is being run out of the UK government’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which is footing £10M of the bill directly, with the balance coming from outside sources.

The Welsh secretary Peter Hain pointed out the need to give industries real help to aid recovery and long-term growth. “This means creating the right conditions for enterprise and maintaining the UK’s position as one of the best places in the world to start and grow a business,” he added.

The universities of Cardiff and Swansea will jointly run the program, which will include education and training in addition to technology

Wales HPC will offer skills-development activities ranging from individual workshops to Masters-level courses. Short-term internships will also support two-way knowledge transfer and create stronger links between HPC Wales and the industrial community.

One thing I can’t work out from the press coverage is whether there is hardware in the deal; I’ve sent some emails, but if you know, drop a comment.

[UPDATE] I’ve had an email from a person familiar with the deployment, and while he couldn’t provide details, there will be a good amount of hardware involved here, distributed over multiple sites (not just Cardiff and Swansea), with a high-speed network linking the various sites. The hardware tender is expected in the first half of next year.

Resource Links:

Latest Video

Industry Perspectives

In this podcast, Terri Quinn from LLNL provides an update on Hardware and Integration (HI) at the Exascale Computing Project. "The US Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories will acquire, install, and operate the nation’s first exascale-class systems. ECP is responsible for assisting with applications and software and accelerating the research and development of critical commercial exascale system hardware. ECP’s Hardware and Integration research focus area (HI), was created to help the laboratories and the ECP teams achieve success through mutually beneficial collaborations." [Read More...]

White Papers

As the financial industry increasingly realizes the impact of faster analytical insights on overall business strategy, artificial intelligence techniques like machine learning are permeating nearly every industry. Download the new white paper from HPE and NVIDIA to learn how to transform financial services with AI technologies, as well as drive business value with NVIDIA GPU-accelerated deep learning.